We let our employees choose their holidays and there is NO expense policy

I attended a great event at the Supper Club this week and fascinated to hear some great insights on finding and retaining talent, probably the biggest challenge for businesses today. Stephen Phillips founder of Zappi talked about empowering staff to help deliver the vision. There are few rules but a sense of purpose. There is no expenses policy – eek I hear you say! But surprisingly Phillips says people don’t take the mickey and often spend less and even when there is no holiday allowance, we have to say to them to take more. It all comes down to TRUST! A trusted workforce is an empowered one that makes decisions with purpose and an overriding sense of responsibility to deliver. Was this open policy challenging for some, yes says Phillips and those that just couldn’t work with it, moved on, it has helped us hugely in the recruitment process too. Culture is everything to us. We have even tried self setting of salaries. As a sales expert, I did gasp at this point, but interestingly it didn’t include the sales teams. Staff sentiments are measured quarterly rather than weekly. Phillips talks also about this simple process of decision making, do we kill, scale or amend. It works – sometimes organisations just simply over complicate things.

Second speaker Charlie Walker, came up through the ranks from the testosterone fueled male dominated money driven sales recruitment industry and realized it wasn’t for him so he created a recruitment company, Harmonic that was all driven by ethics and values. Previously 50% of the sales teams would have left within a year, he has lost just 1 in 2 years and 65% of new intakes come from internal referrals. So committed is Walker into embedding this he only pays the bonus on the commitments of team collaboration, customer testimonials, volunteering and the commitment to the values of the business.

Next up was the founder of the Supper club Duncan Cheatle but also founder of an intriguing app – Learn amp. We talk a lot about customer lifetime value but what about Employee LTV. We need to focus as much about the employee journey as we do the customer journey. Some staggering stats he shared

78% of people who leave in the first 6 months make up their mind in the first 48 hours – so induction matters.

·Effective onboarding around vision, values role etc effectiveness and level of output (whatever the role)

Clear development pathways and engagement through pulse surveys and polls can drive engagement and retention

Our last two speakers covered interesting topics around employee well-being and mental health. Alexandra Galviz talked openly about how she had a burn out after leaving the city managing a huge team at the age of 24. Her openness and honesty created a huge social media following because she told her personal story, now she goes on to teach CEOs about openness in the workplace and why they themselves need to be very visible and not simply allow the marketing team to write posts. So you need to bring your whole self to work not just part of it. Millennial's in particular want transparency. Jo Geraghty who runs a culture lead consultancy shared some insightful stories too about her experiences working with major brands and how many companies are disengaged with their workforce. Switch off the PCs at lunchtime and lets talk together. So many employees bring their lunch to their desk so simply don’t switch off.

Some of the tools used to track employee engagement

·      Slack

·      Northstar

·      Trello

·      Monday

·      Asana

The event was run by the Supper Club and held at Soho House. If you want to find out more about joining the Supper club then visit www.thesupperclub.com